Well, the election is over and Benghazi is still here. I’m taking a break from full time blogging, but Benghazi is something I cannot let go without comment nor should any other American out there. We’re being lied to both by this administration and by the media. Having said that, we’ve had some interesting revelations in the last few days.

Days before the election, CBS admits they held back comments made by President Obama in an interview for 60 minutes given the day after the attacks (9/12). Breitbart via Powerline:

Over at the Breitbart portal, Joel Pollak writes about footage from the 9/12 60 Minutes interview with Barack Obama that CBS left on the cutting room floor until this week. Like so much of the media formerly known as mainstream, CBS News is a hotbed of rabid leftists carefully reporting all the news that fits. At 60 Minutes, the situation is reductio ad absurdum. As Sarah Hoyt observes: “Whether we win or lose, we must make sure the mainstream media are done. The [D]emocrats can pay for their own operatives.”

Even more worthy of note is the stark relief in which this footage places Obama’s continuing liberties with the truth. As Obama’s foremost campaign surrogate put it yesterday: “Who wants a president who will knowingly, repeatedly tell you something he knows isn’t true?” (Dr. Krauthammer, call your office.)

I am taking the liberty of posting Pollak’s report below for the record. Pollak writes:

In an astonishing display of media malpractice, CBS News quietly released proof–two days before the election, far too late to reach the media and the public–that President Barack Obama lied to the public about the Benghazi attack, as well as about his later claim to have called the attack “terrorism” from the beginning.

CBS unveiled additional footage from its 60 Minutes interview with President Obama, conducted on Sep. 12 immediately after Obama had made his statement about the attacks in the Rose Garden, in which Obama quite clearly refuses to call the Benghazi an act of terror when asked a direct question by reporter Steve Kroft:

KROFT: Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word terrorism in connection with the Libya Attack, do you believe that this was a terrorism attack?

OBAMA: Well it’s too early to tell exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans. And we are going to be working with the Libyan government to make sure that we bring these folks to justice, one way or the other.

CBS covered for the President. I am sure other outlets did as well. There is no other way to look at this. Hoyt is correct and I’ve already issued this as one of two things I will be pursuing in 2013: Media Bias.

I do not think CBS is alone in this. I think CNN has more to tell as I’ve written before. We also now have an investigation into information leaked to the NY Times:

It’s also starting to look a bit like the Obama administration was running a Middle East version of Fast and Furious; running guns to rebels, specifically in Syria.

Moving on to the upcoming hearings…

Both the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee have hearings scheduled for November 15th on Benghazi. These are to be closed door hearings involving Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director David Petraeus and Matt Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center. The House FAC has invited Hillary Clinton to testify; she has declined.

Petraeus also will not be testifying now. He resigned yesterday when he admitted to having an extramarital affair. The FBI had been on an ‘unrelated’ case when they uncovered communications implicating Petraeus having an affair. It has been indicated that Petraeus waited until after the election to resign because he did not want to embarrass the President. I can buy that; Petraeus by all accounts and actions has been a man of honor and character. I have a few questions about the timing of this resignation aside from not wanting to be an embarrassment before the election. My personal suspicion is he indeed decided to wait until after the election, but that the announcement of the Benghazi hearing so soon dictated when he resigned. This is my own speculation, but I think Petraeus just shed the only leverage this administration had to keep him silent and he did so in a very public way on purpose. He is now free to be subpoenaed as a private citizen.

UPDATE: The Senate Intelligence Committee announced that Acting CIA Director Michael Morrell will testify Thursday in Petraeus’ place. This doesn’t mean that Petraeus couldn’t be subpoenaed by Congress at some point.

UPDATE: The other woman has been identified as Paula Broadwell, author of All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. Broadwell is married with two young boys. NBC News reports that the FBI was investigating Broadwell for trying to access Petraeus’ email and potentially accessing classified information.

I am sure we will hear more about Broadwell in the days to come. Either she’s really a driven, mercenary-style writer who wants her book(s) on Petraeus to be more thorough than what he has already given her or she’s there to get into classified documents for other purposes. The latter sounds more plausible at this point, however the woman could just be seriously stupid and have dreams of wearing an orange jumpsuit for the rest of her life.

Let’s get back to the upcoming hearings. With Petraeus and Clinton taking a powder. I have no idea what this man Morrell will be able to add. I’m assuming a lot of nothing. That leaves Clapper and Olsen. Any bets one or both won’t be able to testify or if they do it’s a series of non-answers? Interestingly, I didn’t see Panetta on the list. Odd since he seems to be the only one doing any and all talking right now. The Pentagon has offered a timeline saying they responded with a strike team from Tripoli. We already knew that but the questions still remained why they weren’t ordered to the consulate straight away, who gave the order and when. Panetta has made two statements recently that should raise eyebrows. One where Panetta claims there was no adequate air support in the region, begging the question, ‘why the HELL NOT?’.

In a letter to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on Friday, Panetta specifically addressed the claim that the military could have dispatched armed unmanned aerial vehicles, AC-130 gunships or fighter jets to thwart the attack. Such aircraft were not in the region and not an effective option, he said.

Panetta said that based on a continuous evaluation of threats, military forces were spread around Europe and the Middle East to deal with a variety of missions. In the months before the attack, he noted, “several hundred reports were received indicating possible threats to U.S. facilities around the world” and noted that there was no advance notice of imminent threats to U.S. personnel or facilities in Benghazi.

His explanation, however, did not satisfy McCain. In a statement Friday, McCain said Panetta’s letter, “only confirms what we already knew – that there were no forces at a sufficient alert posture in Europe, Africa or the Middle East to provide timely assistance to our fellow citizens in need in Libya. The letter fails to address the most important question – why not?”

Last Paragraph:

“The U.S. Armed Forces did everything they were in position to do to respond to the attack in Benghazi,” Panetta said in the letter, obtained by The Associated Press. “The department’s senior leaders and I spared no effort to save the lives of our American colleagues, as we worked to bolster security in response to a series of other threats in the region occurring at the same time.”

Clearly you didn’t, sir. Four men are dead. This does not answer any questions put to you so far, but instead raises more.

1. Why their security was cut when clearly the region was hostile?

2. Why wasn’t there more air support in an area we knew to be a hotbed and with reported attacks on our embassies in other parts of the Middle East all that day? You’re telling me we hadn’t put anything in place air support-wise?

3. Why was Panetta giving the verbal orders? Panetta mentions talking with the President once in an already scheduled meeting unrelated to the attacks. Any support crossing country borders to get to the men would require Executive authority, yet we have Panetta admitting he himself did not give said verbal orders until between midnight and 2 am. The fighting broke out over 7 hours before that and they had a drone showing them the level of assault. Why did he wait that long?

Between midnight and 2 a.m., Panetta began to issue verbal orders, telling two Marine anti-terrorism teams based in Rota, Spain, to prepare to deploy to Libya, and he ordered a team of special operations forces in Central Europe and another team of special operations forces in the U.S. to prepare to deploy to a staging base in Europe. (AP)

4. Why did this administration and every surrogate for them march out and lie to the American public, pushing an obscure YouTube video as being to blame for a spontaneous protest in Benghazi? This administration clearly knew within the first hour of the assault in Benghazi that this was no protest but a coordinated attack.

President Obama has promised to bring the men who did this to justice. Well, we saw what he did with the scapegoat so one can wonder what they will do with Mohammed Jamal Abu Ahmed, an Islamist freed from jail during the Arab Spring, claiming credit for helping plan the attack that killed our citizens in Benghazi. Dear President Obama, you built that.

UPDATE: Powerline has more details on the emails Petraeus sent and the subsequent FBI outrage the administration did not force him to resign earlier.

Related Reading:

Instapundit has two links to visit on the Petraeus resignation timing and how he should be called to testify anyway. Also, Instapundit has a ton of Petraeus related links here.

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

About ladyliberty1885

A.P. Dillon resides in the Triangle area of North Carolina and is the founder of LadyLiberty1885.com. Her current and past writing can also be found at Da Tech Guy Blog, StopCommonCoreNC.org, WatchdogWireNC and WizBang.
Her current writing project is a children’s book series.